“I see today’s computer world as a nightmare honkytonk prison, noisy and colourful and wholly misbegotten. We must everywhere use ghastly menus designed by people with no sense of the human mind. We are imprisoned in applications that can be customized only in ways the designers alllow (in Unix, you had control, with access to the configuration files). We are in a Dark Ageof documents, most locked in imprisoning formats, canopic jars from which they can never escape, or mangled within by markup which hinders re-use, indexing, connection and overlay and overlap. This is a blighted parody of the computer dreams we had long ago; it’s like being stuck in a fast-food restaurant with all its supersized greaseburgers, posters, toys and mess, and pretending we’re in paradise.
But let us try to be optimistic. Who knows what may yet be possible? All the ideas have not yet been tried.
And what would you want now if there was a real choice?
Think about it.”
So ends Ted Nelson’s wonderful, pithy, insightful and scathing brief book about the inheritied digital landscape we currently (reluctantly) inhabit. This is worth reading if you have any curiosity at all about how it happened…. (facebook denizens may not care as their “walled garden” probably suffices).
